Speakers
Details
Staged by the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in association with the Orwell Trust.
Award-winning BBC broadcaster and novelist, and co-host of BBC’s Newsnight programme, Gavin Esler delivers the inaugural Orwell Lecture at Emirates Litfest. Gavin will discuss the importance of George Orwell to his own work, and examine one under-emphasised area of George Orwell’s thought: the erosion of cultural values – from the awfulness of Victory Gin to the banal and trivial nature of popular culture. And he points out that the Ministry of Truth, depicted in Orwell’s iconic novel, 1984, was mostly dedicated not to rewriting the past, but to producing dim-witted but catchy pop songs, idiotic TV programmes and newspapers obsessed with crime, sport and sex. Did George Orwell really see into the 21st century world of The X Factor, tabloid newspapers and Wayne Rooney?
Links
- Read the lecture in full (Gavin Esler’s website)
- Emirates Airline Festival of Literature
- Orwell Lecture 2011: Alan Rusbridger – The Future of the Press
- Orwell Lecture 2010: Ferdinand Mount – Orwell and the Oligarchs
- Orwell Lecture 2009: Hilary Mantel – “More like a castle than a realm” – Thomas Cromwell’s Radical England
- Orwell Lecture 2008: Andrew O’Hagan – The English
- Orwell Lecture 2007: Michael Rosen – The Politics of Response
- George Orwell Memorial Lecture at Birkbeck College